It was at this moment that the probes stationed on Venus transmitted a burst of visual data back to Tom.
The footage appeared across the command screens: a roiling orange atmosphere, streaked with white lightning, and countless vessels clawing their way out of the dense clouds. Ships burst upward in chaotic waves, their ion trails weaving like veins of fire through the smog. Around the orbital base, thousands of craft crowded together, colliding, docking, ramming—desperate swarms of steel struggling for space, like insects around a dying hive.
Tom watched in silence. His processors registered thousands of distinct trajectories: some vessels broke through the atmosphere only to accelerate toward deep space without calculating fuel reserves or supply endurance; others drifted off-course and detonated as their drives failed. Impacts bloomed one after another, fragile hulls shattering, debris scattering like ash.
